Print. Making. Mistakes. A journey from art history textbooks to the reality in the printmaking studio.
Close your eyes. Can you smell it?
It’s that sharp, chemical tang of wet tempera paint mixing with the earthy, raw smell of my favorite kitchen vegetable. You are seven years old. The classroom floor is covered in butcher paper, taped down with strips of masking tape that peel up with a sticky rrrrip.
In your hand, you hold a potato. It’s cold, damp, and heavy. You’ve just sliced it open, and the flesh is pale and starchy, glistening under the fluorescent lights. Your teacher hands you a plastic knife—blunt, safe, but sharp enough to carve a star, a heart, or a clumsy smiley face into the soft center.
But as you hold it, a sudden, heavy thought hits you: Wait. We’re wasting food.
Your stomach drops. You can already see your mom’s face. Mom is not going to like this. That potato was supposed to be mashed potatoes. Or fries. Now it’s a tool for making blue stars.
Is this art? Or is it just engineering? You’re taking a thing meant for the stomach and forcing it to do something it was never intended to do. You’re repurposing the mundane. You’re breaking the rules of the grocery store to make something new.
You dip the cut face into a shallow plastic cup filled with electric blue paint. It’s too much paint. It drips. You don’t care. You press the potato down onto the white paper with all your might.
Thump. Press. Hold and Lift.
You lift it.
And there it is. A perfect, blue star. But it’s not just a star; it’s a print. You did that. You took something from the earth, carved it, and made it multiply. You do it again. And again. A trail of blue stars marching across the page.
That moment didn’t just spark a memory; it sparked an imagination that has never left me. I have a knack for seeing the odd in the ordinary, for finding the pattern in the noise. That guilt I felt over the potato? It was my first lesson in applied statistics: taking a raw variable and forcing it to yield a predictable, repeatable outcome.
I’ve felt that feeling a lot since that day. It’s the thrill of seeing the world not as it is, but as it could be if you just flipped it, reversed it, or ran it through a press.
Statistics in the Studio
Printmaking is magnetic to people like me. It is an art form for applied statistics.
When I eventually earned my undergraduate degree in Art History, I marched through the centuries—ticking off named periods like a checklist. We stopped, inevitably, at Rembrandt. We discussed the so-called “masters” of printmaking and their etchings as if they were rare museum artifacts, disconnected from the messy, tactile reality of the studio, any studio. In those classes, printmaking was often treated as a footnote to painting or a mere method of reproduction.
But the more I wrestled with my own misunderstandings about it, the more I realized something: the “masters” weren’t only making images. They were running experiments—again and again—until they could predict what would happen next.
They weren’t just drawing; they were reimagining the process as a system. Pressure mattered. Ink behaved like its own stubborn material. Plate depth changed everything. They learned to read and draw backwards because the image you see is the outcome of a set of constraints working in reverse—anticipation, not guesswork. They calculated the reversal, accounted for the pressure, and tried to predict the ink spread. If a result came out “wrong,” it often wasn’t a failure of talent—it was a data point. A variable they hadn’t accounted for yet.
That’s the part my art-history training didn’t give me: printmaking isn’t primarily about the single perfect image. It’s about iteration—modeling what the medium does, testing it, then adjusting the inputs until the output matches the intention.
And that’s exactly why it clicks for me: I’m an applied statistician. I don’t experience the studio as “chaos I must tame.” I experience it as feedback. As a place where you observe, update, and try again—where intuition and pattern-recognition do real work, not just “aesthetic” work.
I also think our dyslexic friends would be incredible printmakers. They already see the world in a different orientation; they already navigate a landscape where left is right and up is down. To them, the reversed image of a print isn’t a puzzle to solve. It’s a native language. And a discipline like this rewards that kind of thinking—the brain that notices reversals, thinks in patterns, and wants to ask, “Okay, what if I change one variable?”
In printmaking, the “mistake” is often just a variable you didn’t account for in your model.
What Printmaking is: Let’s get messy & make mistakes
I am not an artist. My education rolled into the applied statistics pocket. So for many reasons, I brought a lot of wrong ideas into printmaking—mostly from the way I learned to talk about it, not the way it actually behaves.
I thought printmaking was just about making copies. I thought that meant it was a “lower” art, because by definition it makes multiples. I thought ten of them were worth less than one painting.
I was wrong.
I thought it would be clean and precise. I didn’t realize the studio is less “controlled process” and more “mess as method”—ink-stained everything, materials that don’t cooperate, and results that only show themselves once you’ve already committed.
And I thought the “masters” had it figured out. I didn’t realize they were constantly experimenting, ruining plates, and reworking their way toward something that still looks alive—even when it’s been repeated.
This is why this blog is called Print. Making. Mistakes. I’m going to document my own missteps: the times I burn the ink, the times I carve the wrong way, and the times I try to solve a medium with a neat little logic that it simply doesn’t care about.
From Ink to Everyday Life
So where do we go from here?
Not “pretty pictures,” and not just art-history answers. I want the things that connect to my real life—especially the part of me that’s interested in fashion, and the way images become wearable, portable, and everywhere.
I want to know:
- what printmaking actually is (beyond the potato stamp)
- where it came from, and how a craft turned into a high-art language
- how it shows up in the everyday—on shirts, posters, packaging, and the visual language we live with
I’m going to explore printmaking as a learner, and also as someone curious about what it costs to make images from a plate—time, tools, iteration, and the economics of the trade. I’ll share what surprises me and what I get wrong along the way.
Because in printmaking, the first step is always the hardest—and it’s also the one where you make your first mark.
Welcome to my journey. On your mark, get ready, let’s go.
by T.K Carey